Leonard Suryajaya: Parting Gift for Quarantine Blues

Esker Foundation
January 20 - April 28

Leonard Suryajaya creates lush, fantastical images that meditate on intimacy, belonging, and home. Vibrating with colour, pattern, and texture, his photographs pay close to everyday objects and their relational significance to his subjects, who are often family, friends, and community members. Through Suryajaya’s camera lens, these mundane items become conduits for love, kinship, boredom, anxiety, or grief, channelling the oft-inexpressible contours of intimate or familial bonds.

Parting Gift for Quarantine Blues is a site-specific installation that cumulatively reflects on Suryajaya’s past, present, and future relations. The installation weaves together images from his two most recent bodies of work: Quarantine Blues, which focuses on Suryajaya’s life and community in Chicago during the COVID-19 pandemic; and Parting Gift, which explores his relationship to his Chinese-Indonesian family as he applies for US citizenship, a process that will ultimately necessitate the renunciation of his Indonesian citizenship.

Originally trained in theatre, Suryajaya’s photographs often begin with the creation of an elaborate set. He then populates the set with a curated selection of consumer items that offer glimmers of insight into his subjects, familial histories, or relational dynamics. Finally, his friends or family activate the set, assuming absurd and humorous poses that gesture to the depth, tenderness, and complexity of their bond with Suryajaya. The specifics of the set and pose are often developed through conversation with his subjects – the resulting image is a mediated reflection of a relationship at a particular place and time. Certain people, objects, and set pieces appear in different contexts across multiple photographs, alluding to the fluidity of interpersonal dynamics, and the ways in which material fragments become imbued with meaning through the passage of time.

This process serves as a vehicle for the artist to navigate complicated familial histories of migration, displacement, assimilation, intergenerational trauma, and a complex dance between individual autonomy and the familial collective. His photographs resonate with the tensions inherent to growing up within the Chinese diaspora in Indonesia, to being queer within a religious family in a conservative country, and to navigating citizenship claims across two countries, each with an ascendant far right politic. The installation’s component images together reflect ambivalently on what it means to belong, and how the relationships and objects that punctuate our everyday lives coalesce into home.

BIOGRAPHY
Leonard Suryajaya (Chicago, IL) uses his work to test the boundaries of intimacy, community and family. He uses photography, video, performance and installation to show how the everyday is layered with histories, meanings and potential.

BFA, 2013, California State University, Fullerton; MFA, 2015, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; 2017, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Selected exhibition venues include Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago; Arsenale Nord, Venice; Benaki Museum, Greece; Photoforum Pasquart, Switzerland; National Library, Singapore; Wrightwood 659, Chicago; Aperture Gallery, NY; The Block Museum, Chicago; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Frost Museum, Miami. His work is included in collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Block Museum, Vontobel Art Collection, Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, Mana Contemporary and Center for Photography at Woodstock. Awards: DCASE Esteemed Artist Award, Aaron Siskind Foundation Award, Artadia Awards, Robert Giard Foundation Fellowship, CENTER Excellence in Multimedia Award, New Artist Society Award, James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship, Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Prize for Emerging Artist, The Santo Foundation Fellowship.

Open: Wed - Fri: 11:00 - 18:00, Sat & Sun: 12:00 - 17:00
Access: Location is wheelchair accessible. Exhibition is child friendly.
For more information see eskerfoundation.com

Esker Foundation, 4th floor, 1011 9th Ave SE, Calgary, AB T2G 0H7